State Government Takes Leading Role in Response to Terrorism Threat
New Jersey Business › Vol. 51 Nbr. 4, April 2005
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State Government Takes Leading Role in Response to Terrorism Threat
If one lesson can be learned from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it is that Homeland Security, whether on a state or national level, cannot be run in silos where disparate agencies fail to interact with one another in sharing valuable information. Some of the findings by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, chaired by former New Jersey Governor Thomas H. Kean, bring up this point. The nation's intelligence community had no comprehensive review of what they knew and did not know about Osama bin Laden. The FBI, the Commission's report revealed, had limited ability to collect and share intelligence. Finally, while clues of an impending attack were discovered at various agencies, no one was able to piece them all together.
Even if clues were evident enough to reveal a possible attack on U.S. soil, the threats were not taken seriously. "One of the tragic things about 9-11 was that it was predictable," says Sidney J. Caspersen, director of the New Jersey Office of Counter-Terrorism (OCT). "We had been seeing bin Laden get more aggressive from 1996 to 2000, with attacks on the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Tanzania and the attack on the USS Cole, but the U.S. was dealing with him the same way over and over again - with threats and innuendos and maybe a missile here and there. They (al Qaeda) saw this as a weakness and figured it was time to attack us on our own soil."Approximately 3,000 lives ...See the full content of this document
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